Touch and Enter

In a comment on yesterday’s Towel Day post, Marta said:

The miracle of the towel! The man who realized this was a man to be reckoned with indeed.

That got me thinking: how cool it would be to come up with a… a something — an in-joke, an idea, a catchphrase, a little fictional detail, an entire story — which lodges in readers’ minds, gets passed around even among people who never read the original, and becomes part of the culture’s stock of unchanging raw materials.

Like towels in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, say.

Or — to broaden the focus to the almost 100% universal (First World) level: The Wizard of Oz. Not the book, either (sorry, L. Frank Baum) — the movie.

• “I’ll get you, my pretty.”
• “…and your little dog, too!”
• “I do believe in spooks. I do believe in spooks…”
• “Professor Marvel never guesses; he knows!”
• “Auntie Em! Uncle Henry!”
• “Some, where—” (You almost don’t have to finish the phrase.)
• “If I only had a brain”
• “Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!”
• “First they tore my legs off and threw them over there…”

(etc. etc. etc. — all of which I or other people have used in conversations in recent months.)

Such phrases — such images — immediately bloom when touched by participants or passersby. They’re like the conversational equivalents of the mezuzah affixed to the lintel of a doorway of a Jewish household. We touch them going in; we touch them going out. Over time, they become burnished by all that handling, smooth, shiny, blending in with the surroundings until it’s all just one surface, reassuring when we touch it still but for long-forgotten reasons, a constant reminder of the presence of universal truth and our obligation — our willingness — to participate in it. Entry into the culture practically demands comfortable handling of these tokens.

For a number of years — both before and after the publication of his second book — Joseph Heller became slightly sick of Catch-22. He was sick of being asked when (or worse, whether) he’d write another book as good. He was tired of people thinking of nothing other than Catch-22 when they heard his name.

Semi-famously, his original title for the book was Catch-18. (Actually, his very earliest working title for it was reportedly Catch-14.) Just before its publication, though, a different publisher announced its plans to publish Leon Uris’s novel Mila 18; when that publisher heard about the upcoming Catch-18, they lodged a protest to Heller’s publisher — who changed it to -22.*

I’ve wondered about it, but I’ve never heard or read of Heller’s own response to all this title-changing. (I’m pretty sure that no typewriter in existence back then had a global search-and-replace function; I hope Heller himself didn’t have to change all occurrences of the number!)

But I do know that if you ask someone today about Mila 18, if they respond at all it will be with puzzlement.** But almost none of us wonder what “catch-22″ means, capitalized, italicized, or not.

So is it just dumb luck and marketing? Do these phrases and images have natural attributes which distinguish them from all other candidates — enable them to transcend the merely trendy catchphrase of a TV sitcom and live on for decades after their coinage?

And the real kicker: have you ever come up with a phrase like any of these which (all right) coulda been a contender, coulda been somebody… if only?

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* I did find an interesting post at a forum called “The Phrase Finder,” which suggested a reason why the number 22 (as opposed to, say, 26 or –yes — 42) might have been appropriate, even if it wasn’t Heller’s first choice:

…why did Heller call his book Catch 22? I found what I think is the answer in, of all places, a review of a TV programme in a daily paper. The programme was about the daylight missions flown by the USAAF over Germany. Many of the aircraft were shot down; others were damaged but managed to get back to England. A very few were so damaged that, although they could still fly, they couldn’t make it back to base. Such aircraft were allowed by US military law to divert to neutral countries like Sweden and Switzerland. Once there, the crews were interned but they were out of the war. This near-death scenario of gross but not fatal damage was covered by USAAF general directive number 22. Hence, if you could fall into, or catch, the tiny area of severe but not disastrous damage, all would be well. However the likelihood was that you wouldn’t and you’d be either shot down and possibly killed, or back in the war.

(Other than this brief paragraph, I’ve found no other reference online to a USAAF “general directive number 22″ — including any other reference to the television show.)

When I first heard the story about Catch-18, I thought: how stupid. 18 doesn’t sound right. But 22, ah, yes… It’s practically onomatopoeia: “Catch-22″ even sounds like something with a lot of sharp and sticky edges and corners. When you say it aloud, your tongue and teeth and breath get all caught up with one another. It clatters in the mouth.

** The title Mila 18 actually referred to a street address: 18 Mila Street in Warsaw… the location of the headquarters of the ZOB, a group of Jewish fighters against the Nazis. I don’t know, but like to imagine, that the doorway at that address was adorned with a mezuzah — allowing me to bring this post full circle.